Carl Phillips

Not less; only—different. Not everything should be visible. Wingdom: doves. Not everything can be. There are many parts to the body.The light, like I said. Gratia exempli, per person more than one heart. As, of hearts, more than one kind. As coin. As thrust. To begin counting is to understand what it can mean, to lose track. Is there nothing not useful? Anything left, anymore, private?Ambition, like they said: little torch; having meant to. Doom is always in style somewhere and, where it isn't, will come back. Bird in the bush, take me. Splendor: nothing priceless. To believe anything, to want anything—these, too, have cost you.Flame, and the beveled sword, set inside it. This one, this—what did you think body was? What did you mean when you said not everything should be said?The light as a tipped cone, searching. The body that breaks finally, routinely faltering before that.If a sword, then without patience; if as water–pearled, swift. What else could you have thought, when you thought love–having known the torch, having more than meant to.Just watch me. Not grand; only—distant.Weather, and the bleachable skull, set inside it. Locust-wind, small through-the-yellow-sycamore fingering wind, Carry me, let the prayer—valiant, up— go. Some bright and last thing should.

No eye that sees could fail to remark you: like any leaf the rain leaves fixed to and flat against the barn’s gray shingle. But what leaf, this time of year, is so pale, the pale of leaves when they’ve lost just enough green to become the green that means loss and more loss, approaching? Give up the flesh enough times, and whatever is lost gets forgotten: that was the thought that I woke to, those words in my head. I rose, I did not dress, I left no particular body sleeping and, stepping into the hour, I saw you, strange sign, at once transparent and impossible to entirely see through. and how still: the still of being unmoved, and then the still of no longer being able to be moved. If I think of a heart, his, as I’ve found it.... If I think of, increasingly, my own.... If I look at you now, as from above, and see the diva when she is caught in mid- triumph, arms half-raised, the body as if set at last free of the green sheath that has— how many nights?—held her, it is not without remembering another I once saw: like you, except that something, a bird, some wild and necessary hunger, had gotten to it; and like the diva, but now broken, splayed and torn, the green torn piecemeal from her. I remember the hands, and—how small they seemed, bringing the small ripped thing to me.

Other than that, all was still — a quiet so quiet that, as if silence were a kind of spell, and words the way to break it, they began speaking. They spoke of many things: sunset as a raft leaving the water in braids behind it; detachment, the soul, obedience; swans rowing at nightfall across a sky filled with snow; what did they wish they could see, that they used to see; to mean no harm, or to not especially, just now, be looking for it; what would they wish not to see, could they stop seeing; courage mattering so much less than not spooking easily — maybe all nerve is; the search-and-rescue map wildflowers make of a field in summer; deserving it, versus asking for it, versus having asked, and been softly turned from. They said it would hurt, and it does.

—shored by trees at its far ending, as is the way in moral tales: whether trees as trees actually, for their shadow and what inside of it hides, threatens, calls to; or as ever-wavering conscience, cloaked now, and called Chorus; or, between these, whatever falls upon the rippling and measurable, but none to measure it, thin fabric of this stands for. A kind of meadow, and then trees—many, assembled, a wood therefore. Through the wood the worn path, emblematic of Much Trespass:Halt. Who goes there? A kind of meadow, where it ends begin trees, from whose twinning of late light and the already underway darkness you were expecting perhaps the stag to step forward, to make of its twelve-pointed antlers the branching foreground to a backdrop all branches; or you wanted the usual bird to break cover at that angle at which wings catch entirely what light’s left, so that for once the bird isn’t miracle at all, but the simplicity of patience and a good hand assembling: first the thin bones, now in careful rows the feathers, like fretwork, now the brush, for the laying-on of sheen....As is always the way, you tell yourself,in poems—Yes, always, until you have gone there, and gone there, “into the field,” vowing Only until there’s nothing more I want— thinking it, wrongly, a thing attainable, any real end to wanting, and that it is close, and that it is likely, how will you not this time catch hold of it: flashing, flesh at once lit and lightless, a way out, the one dappled way, back—

Less the shadow than you a stag, sudden, through it. Less the stag breaking cover than the antlers, with which crowned. Less the antlers as trees leafless, to either side of the stag’s head, than— between them—the vision that must mean, surely, rescue. Less the rescue. More, always, the ache toward it. When I think of death, the gleam of the world darkening, dark, gathering me now in, it is lately as one more of many other nights figured with the inevitably black car, again the stranger’s strange room entered not for prayer but for striking prayer’s attitude, the body kneeling, bending, until it finds the muscled patterns that predictably, given strain and release, flesh assumes. When I think of desire, it is in the same way that I do God: as parable, any steep and blue water, things that are always there, they only wait to be sounded. And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps should ask pardon. My fears—when I have fears— are of how long I shall be, falling, and in my at last resting how indistinguishable, inasmuch as they are countless, sire, all the unglittering other dropped stones.

If, when studying road atlases while taking, as you call it, your morning dump, you shout down to me names like Miami City, Franconia, Cancún, as places for you to take me to from here, can I help it if all I can think is things that are stupid, like he loves me he loves me not? I don’t think so. No more than, some mornings, waking to your hands around me, and remembering these are the fingers, the hands I’ve over and over given myself to, I can stop myself from wondering does that mean they’re the same I’ll grow old with. Yesterday, in the café I keep meaning to show you, I thought this is how I’ll die maybe, alone, somewhere too far away from wherever you are then, my heart racing from espresso and too many cigarettes, my head down on the table’s cool marble, and the ceiling fan turning slowly above me, like fortune, the part of fortune that’s half-wished- for only—it did not seem the worst way. I thought this is another of those things I’m always forgetting to tell you, or don’t choose to tell you, or I tell you but only in the same way, each morning, I keep myself from saying too loud I love you until the moment you flush the toilet, then I say it, when the rumble of water running down through the house could mean anything: flood, your feet descending the stairs any moment; any moment the whole world, all I want of the world, coming down.

There is a difference it used to make, seeing three swans in this versus four in that quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its effects were. Declarations of war, the timing fixed upon for a sea- departure; or, about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kind of choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama, what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged, something that could know better, and should, therefore—but does not: a form of faith, you've said. I call it sacrifice—an instinct for it, or a habit at first, that becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have of what was true. You shouldn't look at me like that. Like one of those saints on whom the birds once settled freely.

Do not imagine you can abdicate Auden Prologue If the sea could dream, and if the sea were dreaming now, the dream would be the usual one: Of the Flesh. The letter written in the dream would go something like:Forgive me—love, Blue. * I. The Viewing (A Chorus) O what, then, did he look like? He had a good body. And how came you to know this? His body was naked. Say the sound of his body. His body was quiet. Say again—quiet? He was sleeping. You are sure of this? Sleeping? Inside it, yes. Inside it. * II. Pavilion Sometimes, a breeze: a canvas flap will rise and, inside, someone stirs;a bird? a flower? One is thinking Should there be thirst, I have only to reach for the swollen bag of skin beside me, I have only to touch my mouth that is meant for a flower to it, and drink.

The sea was one thing, once; the field another. Either way, something got crossed, or didn’t. Who’s to say, about happiness? Whatever country, I mean, where inconceivable was a word like any other lies far behind me now. I’ve learned to spare what’s failing, if it can keep what’s living alive still, maybe just awhile longer. Ghost bamboo that the birds nest in, for example, not noticing the leaves, color of surrender, color of poverty as I used to imagine it when I myself was poor but had no idea of it. I’ve always thought gratitude’s the one correct response to having been made, however painfully, to see this life more up close.The higher gods having long refused me, let the gods deemed lesser do the best they can

As through marble or the lining of certain fish split open and scooped clean, this is the blue vein that rides, where the flesh is even whiter than the rest of her, the splayed thighs mother forgets, busy struggling for command over bones: her own, those of the chaise longue, all equally uncooperative, and there’s the wind, too. This is her hair, gone from white to blue in the air. This is the black, shot with blue, of my dark daddy’s knuckles, that do not change, ever. Which is to say they are no more pale in anger than at rest, or when, as I imagine them now, they follow the same two fingers he has always used to make the rim of every empty blue glass in the house sing. Always, the same blue-to-black sorrow no black surface can entirely hide. Under the night, somewhere between the white that is nothing so much as blue, and the black that is, finally; nothing, I am the man neither of you remembers. Shielding, in the half-dark, the blue eyes I sometimes forget I don’t have. Pulling my own stoop- shouldered kind of blues across paper. Apparently misinformed about the rumored stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired, I was told look for blue.